Word trickled out of canyon country. The Powell expedition had failed, and most of the explorers had drowned.

John Wesley Powell and his men pressed downstream, very much alive, as the rumors drifted east. They had lost a boat and some supplies before they had gotten very far. Food spoiled. Nerves frayed and tempers flared. They roped and portaged wooden boats around rumbling stretches of whitewater, climbed back in and rowed to the next rapid. They grew hungry and overheated, then cold and drenched with rain.

In August 1869, Powell and six members of the 10-man crew emerged from the Grand Canyon.

Powell's journey "was one of the greatest events in the history of American exploration," Donald Worster writes in "A River Running West."

The Arizona Territory was one of the last places Americans settled. Although statehood was decades away, trappers, soldiers and prospectors had mapped the deserts and high country until one barrier remained: the vast, precarious canyon of the Colorado River. By the time Arizona became a state, the Grand Canyon had become a national treasure.

Today, the Canyon draws more than 4 million visitors a year from around the world. It is a source of pride and revenue for the state and a favorite destination for hikers and river runners. Sprawling, arid, stormy, serene, its landscapes sweeping from desert to pine forests, it captures the spirit of Arizona like few other places.

'Altogether valueless'

The first people to explore the Canyon were Paleo-Indians and Archaic hunter-gatherers who arrived about 10,000 years ago, leaving spear points and other objects for archaeologists to ponder.

They were followed by Pueblo, Havasupai, Hualapai, Navajo, Southern Paiute and other people who lived along river and rim when Spanish explorers came to the region. The Spanish found the Canyon a distraction from their mission of finding gold and quickly tired of seeking a way to the bottom. The Europeans could not be blamed for their inability to comprehend what was before them. They still believed the Earth was a few thousand years old -- Darwin had not yet suggested otherwise and geology did not exist. Artists had just begun to explore the concept of perspective. The Canyon's wonders eluded the Spanish.

"The Grand Canyon was an impenetrable tangle of coñones, mesas and rapids, inaccessible, peripheral, not a presence so much as an absence, a place to be avoided, and so it was," Stephen Pyne writes in "How the Canyon Became Grand."

American trappers also were unable to grasp the Canyon's age or scale and had little appreciation for its beauty. Trapper James Pattie referred to "these horrid mountains" after passing along the rim, hungry, thirsty, unable to reach the river below.

In 1858, Lt. Joseph Christmas Ives, of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, went up the Colorado River by boat and then traveled the South Rim with some reluctant Indian guides, Michael Anderson writes in "Living at the Edge."

The region was "altogether valueless," Ives wrote. "Ours has been the first, and doubtless will be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality." The fact that Ives died 10 years later, Anderson wrote, "saved him later embarrassment."

In 1869, Powell's expedition started with 10 men and four wooden boats loaded with scientific instruments, food and gear, intent on exploring the Grand Canyon.

"It was really unknown. It was just an unmapped spot," said Brad Dimock, a historian who has run the Colorado in replicas of some of the early wooden boats. Although Powell's expedition was supposed to be a scientific trip, it was not well planned, Dimock said.

"He didn't have any scientists with him, other than himself, and he was self-taught." To make matters worse, the crew didn't share Powell's obsession with science. They had signed on as hunters and adventurers.

"It sounded like they might get some trapping in, go for an adventure, get a paycheck," Dimock said.

"What started out as a well-equipped scientific expedition quickly slipped into a journey of survival," Anderson wrote, and "as the river began to churn, the expedition began to lose pieces of itself."

A rapid splintered one of the boats and swept supplies downstream. One crew member left early in the expedition. The rest would have escaped with their lives, but three men who had seen enough and were convinced that the worst was yet to come left the group and headed for the top. It is widely believed they were killed by Indians after getting there.

Powell left the Canyon a couple of days after the party split. The trip did not produce as much scientific data as Powell had hoped, but his success helped him pursuade Congress to fund a survey, from rim to river, of the region. Powell didn't hire frontiersmen this time. He brought in talented artists, photographers and cartographers instead.

Powell's survey filled the last major blank spot on the map. The success of the second survey led Congress to fund more of Powell's work. His studies of Southwestern tribes and geology led to a career of scientific and ethnological study. Powell directed the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology, was the second director of the U.S. Geological Survey and a founding member of the National Geographic Society. He clashed with Congress on how to develop water in the West, but his ideas, decades ahead of their time, ultimately inspired the Bureau of Reclamation.

Mining and tall tales

To help settle Western land, the U.S. government had provided incentives for pioneers -- cheap land, liberal mining laws, free grass, the support of the Army. It helped railroads connect the coasts with generous land grants. The same year Powell set out down the Colorado River, the first transcontinental railroad linked the nation.

When the railroad was complete, the pace of settlement increased. Railroads moved ore from mines, cattle to the range and to market. They also moved tourists.

As word of the Grand Canyon spread, a few prospectors staked claims in the abyss. Most of them were small operators like Louis Boucher, who worked with a pick and a shovel, carving a trail along a shelf of dirt and rock with expansive views.

Boucher arrived around 1889, when stagecoaches still brought sightseers to the Canyon's edge. He built a couple of mining camps and the trails that led to them. He planted fruit trees and worked his claims from time to time, but Boucher probably realized quickly he would not make much money mining. He began to lead tourists into the Canyon for about $5 a day.

A man who claimed to have worked with him said Boucher rode a white mule with a bell around its neck, according to Park Service records. He carried a pick, pan and tools for trail making. He had a white beard and mustache and generally lived alone, but he knew and worked with others guiding people in the Canyon -- men such as Pete Berry and Ralph Henry Cameron.

"He never had any grand schemes or grand plans," said Anderson, a former historian with the National Park Service. "He was just trying to make a living."

Another prospector in the Canyon, John Hance, also spent a lot of time leading tourists. Hance became known for the stories he laced with humor, adventure and shameless lies.

"One day when the canyon was fogged from rim to rim," Anderson writes in "Living at the Edge," "Hance told a party of dudes that it was almost heavy enough for him to ski across. 'I do it every once in a while,' he told the disbelieving party, 'but the last time I tried it, I got about half way across when the fog began to lift. I hurried around from one patch to another, but I just couldn't make it. I finally hit a hole in the fog, and wound up right over there on top of Zoroaster Temple. I was marooned for four weeks before there was enough fog again for me to get out! It was a light fog, but I was lots lighter by that time, too!'"

Claiming the Canyon

By 1901 the Canyon had begun to reach its iconic status, and a "fearsome landscape had become a precious object," Pyne writes. A railroad spur dropped tourists near the Bright Angel Trail, where a bitter conflict had begun to take shape.

The trail had been developed by Cameron and his associates. Under Arizona law, those who built trails and roads could charge a toll. Cameron held 40 to 50 mining claims on the Bright Angel, a seat on Coconino County Board of Supervisors and a great deal of political influence. None of his mines produced ore, but they allowed him to maintain ownership of the trail.

"All of the mining claims he had ... they were all bogus," Anderson said. "They were all intended to tie up strategic pieces of land." As other miners sold their claims, Cameron dug in his heels.

He battled the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway in court for years, framing the conflict as one of individual rights, and for a while it worked.

To work around Cameron's claim to the Bright Angel, the Sante Fe purchased Boucher's trails. The railroad gave Boucher a nickname -- the Hermit, to help market its trails and camps. Creeks, buildings and other features bear his name, or nickname, to this day.

"He was a fairly quiet man, but he was by no means a hermit," Anderson said.

Little but the foundation remains of his cabin along Boucher Creek. The fruit trees are gone. The surrounding hills are covered with prickly-pear cactus, Mormon tea and boulders that have tumbled from towering cliffs.

By 1915, Cameron's influence began to wane. He had run for both the U.S. Senate and Arizona governor and lost. Residents and newspapers, which had at first backed him as a small-business man battling the government, began to see the benefits to the state if Grand Canyon became a national park.

The Canyon was designated a forest preserve in 1893, eventually administered by the Forest Service, which lacked money to do much of anything but put out wildfires. President Theodore Roosevelt made the Canyon a national monument in 1908, but it still lacked the protections afforded national parks. Existing rights and uses were protected when the monument was created, making it difficult to remove mines and toll roads. As calls to make the Canyon a national park grew louder, most of the prospectors started looking for ways to sell their claims. Cameron continued his fight.

"It became more and more clear that Ralph Cameron was trying to maintain this control to his own benefit. He wasn't seen to argue the rights of rugged individuals anymore, but was just a greedy guy trying to get money," Anderson said.

A treasure for all

In 1919, Grand Canyon became a national park. Cameron won a Senate seat in 1920, allowing him to prolong his fight. But he was on the wrong side of history, and there were other ways to the river.

The Park Service built the South Kaibab Trail to bypass the Bright Angel. In 1926, Cameron lost a bid for re-election and "faded from regional history, but remained a tourism promoter and fighter for individuals' rights, mostly his own, for the remainder of his long life," Anderson writes.

Decades rolled by. Cars replaced trains, trails fell into disrepair, only to be rebuilt later. By the 1950s, people like Harvey Butchart and Georgie White Clark began to explore the trails, routes and rapids. Butchart eventually logged 12,000 miles on foot in the Canyon. Clark turned river running into an industry and a lifestyle, taking on rapids with big rubber rafts, a beer close at hand.

Today, most of the millions who see the Canyon do so from the rim, in a whirlwind tour of snapshots from overlooks. Others become obsessed with the changing light, the remote corners, the deep silence, the big river below.

The Canyon is all of these things, and in theory, at least, it belongs to everyone and no one. The days of exploring the Canyon have given way to the days of experiencing it.

The view into the abyss from Mather Point on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

More on this topic

Where Arizona history lives

To celebrate Arizona's statehood centennial, the Travel section is taking a monthly look at a person, place, event or industry that helped shape our state, plus tell you where you can go to see the results of those influences.

Today: The first Europeans who saw the Grand Canyon couldn't get away from it fast enough. Now, more than 4million people a year come to ponder its vastness.

In January: The Hashknife Pony Express.

Kolb brothers exhibit

In 1903, Ellsworth and Emery Kolb started a photography business at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, taking pictures of tourists riding mules down the Bright Angel Trail. They would shoot the photos and develop them by the time the mule riders returned. A blanket over a small cave served as a darkroom and lab until a more permanent structure could be built on the edge of the rim.

In the fall of 1911, the brothers started down the Green River in a wooden boat and continued down the Colorado, much as John Wesley Powell had done. What made their expedition different was that they took a movie camera.

"They weren't prospecting or making any great discoveries," said river historian and guide Brad Dimock. They wanted to take photographs for their business, and to have an adventure. "And they did, because they didn't know how to row."

They hiked out at Bright Angel Canyon and spent some time on the rim, then resumed their journey, which they finished in 1912, the year Arizona became a state. In 1915, the brothers started showing their film to Canyon visitors. It ran for about 61 years, making it the longest-running film in history.

An exhibit of their work opens Monday, Dec. 19, at Kolb Studio, South Rim Village, Grand Canyon National Park. A reception is from 10 a.m. to noon Wednesday, Jan. 4. Emery Kolb's grandson will be at the event. The exhibit runs through Sept. 4. It's free; park admission is $25 per vehicle.